HiddenHelp

Walk away from your screen and the video pauses. Come back and it plays again.

_{Illustration of the behaviour, not a screen recording.}

How it works

1. The webcam is read at 320x240 to keep CPU use low.
2. Once a second, an OpenCV Haar cascade looks for a face in the frame.
3. If no face has been seen for a short while, the app sends a keypress to the focused window, which pauses the video.
4. When a face shows up again, it sends the same key, which resumes it.

Frames never leave your machine. Nothing is saved or uploaded.

Two ways to run it

	gui.py	main.py
Interface	Desktop window with a live camera view, status and start/stop button	Plain OpenCV window
Key it sends	Space (works in most players)	K (YouTube's play/pause key)
Pauses after	2.5 s without a face	1.5 s without a face

Run it

Needs Python 3.9+ and a webcam.

pip install -r requirements.txt
python gui.py      # or: python main.py

Then open your video and click on it so its window has focus. HiddenHelp presses keys in whatever window is focused, so keep the video in front.

Quit with the Quit App button in gui.py, or press q in the main.py window.

Built with

Python, OpenCV (face detection), PyAutoGUI (keypresses), CustomTkinter (desktop UI), Pillow.